The most comprehensive guide to promoting good products on Zhihu

There is a very good question on Zhihu: Why do ordinary people like us always miss out on various bonuses and opportunities?

My answer is simple: because we have never even heard of it. Take Taobao for example. Many years ago, for most people, “What is this? Is it edible?”

Yes, many people don’t know what “Zhihu sales” is. Knowledge determines cognition, and the limitations of cognition lead to the loss of bonus opportunities. Zhihu started internal testing of the Good Things gameplay in August 2019. As a V6 creator, Xiucai was one of the first to receive an official invitation, but he ignored it.

In fact, from the beginning of internal testing to February of this year, Zhihu's live streaming business has been in a lukewarm state. "The platform wants to promote it, but everyone doesn't really want to play it." This is the situation.

It was not until more and more people experienced good things and creators actually earned profits from Zhihu that Zhihu became famous for selling goods.
Please note that this reputation is only for people in the industry, mainly referring to Zhihu big Vs. There are still a large number of creators who are confused about Zhihu's product promotion.

Therefore, Zhihu’s live streaming business is still a super blue ocean market, and those entering the market now are all pioneering players.

What exactly is Zhihu Good Things ?

Zhihu live streaming, also known as "Zhihu good product recommendations", is a new commercial monetization method officially launched by Zhihu.

Everyone can understand it as "Zhihu Taobao Affiliate, treat the Zhihu platform as a Taobao Affiliate agent APP, Zhihu authors can insert Taobao, JD.com, Pinduoduo and Zhihu product purchase links in the article answers, as long as someone places an order through the link, you can get a commission and obtain commission from it", a situation where content brings goods.

Everyone knows Douyin stores, they all work the same way, with sales on Douyin, Kuaishou, Weitoutiao, and even the Toutiao store that was popular for a while.

To put it more bluntly, "You help the merchant sell goods, and after the goods are sold, the merchant gives you a commission."

It looks a bit complicated, but in fact, the gameplay of Zhihu Good Things is very simple.

I can tell you seriously that "even a complete newbie who has never written on Zhihu and has never worked on the Internet can earn a minimum of thousands and a maximum of tens of thousands of dollars from Zhihu every month as long as he masters the methods and tricks."

Before we start the Zhihu Good Products Tutorial, let’s discuss a question first: what are the advantages of Zhihu in promoting products?

I think there are three main advantages.

First, Zhihu’s traffic is stable. Zhihu does not have hundreds of millions of daily active users like TikTok, but Zhihu users have high stickiness and the traffic will continue to flow in the later period. Highly-praised answers have a long-tail effect. Some of the answers written by Xiucai in 2019 still have a lot of exposure. In addition, since Baidu has invested in Zhihu, Zhihu’s traffic sources on the search side will become higher and higher.

Second, Zhihu users are of high quality. I am not saying this casually. If you want to know what the user group is like, just look at the advertisements placed on the platform. Brands will not invest money in a platform that has an inconsistent user group. Many of Zhihu’s advertisements are about “business watches”, “luxury goods”, “cosmetics”, and “B-side placements” … and they are all placed by big brands like Lancome and L’Oreal, which verifies the view that “Zhihu users have extremely strong spending power”.

Third, user stickiness is high. Xiucai often says that the value of fans is different from each other, and this value refers to commercial value. The difference lies mainly in the fan stickiness. When an article is published on a public account, fans will even browse it word by word, but for headlines, everyone just skims the page and reads in a scanning manner. Among the current mainstream platforms, there are two platforms where users can concentrate on reading content, one is the official account and the other is Zhihu.

Zhihu has a very stable path to commercialization. Over the years, Zhihu has accumulated a large amount of in-depth, high-quality content, which other platforms do not have. This is Zhihu's business foundation.

What is the current situation of selling products on Zhihu ?

In the field of smart TV reviews, there is "Blue Immortal", who received 19,000 likes for an article about good products, gained 70,000 followers, and achieved sales of 22 million yuan. Blue Immortal did not reveal the specific commission, but according to Xiucai's own experience in trading, the commission is not cheap.

Any new field that you have never touched upon contains huge dividends and business opportunities. It just depends on whether you are willing to take action and make a difference.

In this article, Xiucai will teach you step by step how to become a high-commission Zhihu player and how to become a mature sales expert.

How to qualify for Zhihu Good Things? Please look at the picture below. The content of this picture can be viewed through the following path: "Zhihu - Creator Center - Good Item Recommendation"

The official list of five requirements for making good things on Zhihu:

Alliance account, creator level, registration time>90, no violation of Zhihu rules in 90 days, only personal accounts can apply1 , Alliance account refers to : Taobao Alliance of Taobao, JD Alliance of JD, and Pinduoduo's Duoduo Jinbao. You can search on Baidu or the App Store, complete the registration on these three platforms first, and then bind it with your Zhihu account.

Friends who are doing Taobao will not be unfamiliar with these platforms. If you have a ready-made account, you can directly bind it on Zhihu.

2. Creator level > 4. The creator level is the official level assessment of the author's account . When you publish your first answer or article on Zhihu, you can open the [Creator Center]. There are ten levels from V1 to V10. Each level corresponds to different permissions. V3 opens live broadcast permissions, V4 opens content self-recommendation, V6 opens LIVE, etc. Interested friends can check it out in the Creator Center.

The early threshold for selling products on Zhihu was V2, which gradually became V3, and now V4. The gradually increasing threshold is also a reflection of the popularity of Zhihu in terms of selling products.

Many friends have benefited from the platform dividends of the "618" event. One account can earn thousands of dollars a day. The income from the multi-matrix layout is very terrifying. It is expected that there will be several waves of huge explosions in income during the Double Eleven and Double Twelve nodes.

How do creators upgrade from V1 to V4?

Official statement: Creator levels are updated every Monday, and upgrades are mainly based on experience growth, which is specifically affected by "content quality points", "content influence points", and "creative behavior points".

Content quality score: I personally think there are two main points worth paying attention to, namely "the number of words in the creative content" (that is, if each answer is more than 1,000 words, it would be best, and at least 100 words if it is less), and good formatting "specifically manifested in the combination of pictures and text."

Content influence score: mainly refers to the likes, collections, and other scores obtained by answering questions or posting articles or videos. The initial impact was not significant.

Creative behavior score: indicates how active you are on the Zhihu platform. You write articles, post answers, do live broadcasts, post videos, etc. every day.

It used to be quite difficult for creators to upgrade. Some authors had been writing on Zhihu for a year and might not have reached V4. But with Zhihu’s recent multiple updates, I’ve discovered a very useful little trick to share with you.

Tips for quick upgrade: Write 3 Zhihu answers every day, each with "more than 200 words", and upload 3 original videos every day. It is very easy to record original videos. You can open your phone to record a game, or find a quiet place to read an article to your phone. It is expected that it will be possible to upgrade from V1 to V4 within 10 days. This is the fastest and simplest method that Xiucai has summarized after communicating with many colleagues and conducting his own tests.

Don’t underestimate this skill. Currently, a V4 level account costs hundreds of yuan to purchase. For people who are doing matrices, being able to quickly create an account by themselves can save a lot of money.

3. Now let’s take a look at the “Registration time greater than 90 days” rule . If you have browsed Zhihu by yourself before, you can use your own account, and the registration time should be greater than 90 days.

If you don’t use Zhihu yourself, you can borrow an account from a friend who does, or find a channel to buy it online. I won’t go into details about this. If you really can’t find it, you can chat with Xiucai privately and he will recommend it to you.

4. The next rule is "No violation of Zhihu rules within 90 days". Most accounts meet this rule. If it does not meet the requirement, please refer to the previous rule for solution.

The last rule is "only for personal accounts" , which has little to do with most people. It mainly refers to the fact that company-registered institutional accounts cannot make product recommendations.

At this point, you can have a V4 level Zhihu account by following the above instructions.

After setting up your account, you can start selling products on Zhihu.

How to promote products on Zhihu?

The method of inserting product links is very simple. In the past, when writing content on Zhihu, you would just add pictures and then publish it. Now, just insert a product purchase link in the article or answer. When users click on the purchase, you will get a commission. It is that simple.

Zhihu’s answers to product recommendations are almost all in the form of inventory articles, and the content of the articles mainly consists of reviews and usage experiences.

For example , Xiucai asks you to recommend me some popular restaurants, some good books, and some delicious snacks.

Do you think : Zhang Liang Malatang tastes good, Lao Li Chicken Pot is generous in portion, and Shaxian snacks have good meat quality.
Do you think that The Little Prince is a healing remedy for adulthood, Love in a Fallen City tells all the entanglements of love, and The Kite Runner is the best friendship novel.
Do you think this : "The Shawshank Redemption" is the most touching inspirational story, "To Live" talks about the bitterness of life in a plain way, and "Farewell My Concubine" tells the story of the fickleness of the world.

To make good things on Zhihu, you must position yourself as a friend of the readers, so that the content you write is colloquial. You must also position yourself as a shopping guide in a mall, who knows how to sell products better.

Simply put, when you write content about good things on Zhihu, you just want people to buy the products you recommend so that you can make a profit.

There are two ways to achieve this:

One is professional evaluation. (Use industry knowledge to prove your authority. This is common in the field of digital products such as notebooks and mobile phones. Most of the materials are collected from other websites.)

One is to recommend to everyone based on personal experience (this type is common in almost most fields, including clothing, cosmetics, etc., and the materials mostly come from platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Weibo)

Both of these writing perspectives are very helpful in converting deals.

But everyone must have a problem: many cosmetics have never been used, many furniture have never been bought, and many snacks have never been eaten. How can I write about it if I have never experienced it?

That’s great. No one has ever used, bought or eaten this thing. In fact, except for a small number of creators, everyone is like this, even many of the answers you see with thousands of likes are like this.

Content creators must find ways to save on creation costs. If you are not even sure whether every article you write will go viral, and you buy a bunch of things and take them home, you will be broke in less than a month.

How to write a highly praised answer without real experience?

There is a lot of content to this point, I will briefly talk about it here. If you want to know more skills, you can read the Zhihu Operation Book I wrote.

You can find content materials on other platforms, such as Xiaohongshu, Taobao, JD.com…

If you look closely, you will find that the copywriting content of Zhihu's product promotion is very similar to Taobao's seller shows.

This is a screenshot of a comment from a Taobao seller show. Let’s take a look at the highly praised content on Zhihu.
Is the content style very similar? So, the key to writing good Zhihu product copywriting is deliberate practice. What should you practice deliberately ? The ability to write positive reviews for e-commerce sellers. Everyone knows that many positive reviews are originally designed by businesses to increase conversion rates.

This is a way to find content materials. After reading hundreds of reviews, don’t you know what this snack tastes like? How does this product perform? How effective is this cosmetic?

Integrating materials and processing them is the commonly used method of writing good things on Zhihu.

People who are familiar with this usually don't want to tell you about this, for fear that you might steal their job. However, Xiucai personally believes that information only has value when it is shared, and only through communication can more interesting gameplay be produced, which is also the purpose of Xiucai's writing.

Whether you are writing articles to recommend good things on Zhihu or other copywriting, I think there is only one real basic writing skill: imitate and constantly revise your own articles. Many famous writers practice writing in this way.

After talking about content creation, let’s talk about a more in-depth topic.

How to find questions and answer them on Zhihu?

Choosing the right questions is very important for us when using Zhihu, whether it is to attract traffic or bring products.

You can think of choosing questions on Zhihu as choosing products in e-commerce. Our goal is to avoid the highly competitive red ocean market and choose to delve deeper into the blue ocean field.

To put it a little exaggeratedly, if you can choose the right questions on Zhihu, your return on sales will increase several times.

Due to limited space, I will only briefly introduce several methods of selecting questions on Zhihu, which are also real and useful methods of selecting topics that everyone can implement.

The first option: Combine with Baidu search traffic.

Let me first popularize the concept of Baidu SEO: Baidu itself is a search engine. In addition to Baidu's own content, it simply crawls the content of all websites to form the pages that everyone sees when searching.

So when you search for keywords, you can see page information from websites such as Zhihu, Jianshu, Douban, etc. on Baidu.

Just like what you can see in this picture, I searched the keyword "efficient book reading" on Baidu, and Baidu displayed several contents. The first was the Douban website, the second was an aggregation page, and the third was the Zhihu platform.

Have you ever thought about this: with so many websites, why are Douban and Zhihu ranked at the top?

In fact, it is based on Baidu's algorithm. For the better search experience of users, the algorithm automatically marks some websites with better content and puts them in front. This is the search weight.

Zhihu has a very high search weight in Baidu. On the one hand, Baidu itself has invested in Zhihu, so the cooperative relationship must be taken care of. On the other hand, Zhihu has a lot of high-quality content, so Zhihu’s search weight is particularly high.

We extend this idea. Some questions have great commercial value and rank high on Baidu, but in fact there is not much competition for these questions on Zhihu and the number of views is amazing. So if we cover this kind of words, will we have a lot of exposure?

It's like someone searches on Baidu for [Any good cosmetics recommendations?], and then you answer this question, and your answer ranks at the top. People read your answer and buy the products, and you also get a commission. Isn't that great?

This is a way of selling products on Zhihu that is not an orthodox method, but it is very useful and informative.

To put it bluntly, if you don't play it this way, as a complete newbie, when you search for questions on Zhihu, you will usually find popular questions, and your opponents will have answers with thousands or tens of thousands of likes. It will be difficult for a new account to compete with them, and your probability of making a profit is very low.

The specific operations are as follows:

Step 1: Open Baidu and search for "5118" webmaster.

Step 2: Click on the 5118 official website to enter.

Step 3: Enter "Website Baidu Mobile Ranking Word Query" in the homepage search box: www.zhihu.com

Step 4: Jump to this page, which is the link to all the questions on Zhihu that have been indexed by Baidu. We click to export data. (You need to be a member to download this. If you are not a member, you can add a scholar to get the form)

Step 5: After downloading, we get an Excel table. We can search according to keywords in Excel to find all the industry problem links. PS: Daily search volume represents the number of people who search for keywords every day. Generally, you can estimate the daily page views outside the site by looking at the PC daily search volume and mobile daily search volume.

Step 6: After finding the links to keyword questions in your industry, open them one by one on the web page, jump to the answers on Zhihu, look at the competitiveness of the questions, and find questions with large views and low competitiveness (mainly based on the small number of answers and low number of likes from competitors) and answer them.

This is the first method to retrieve high-quality questions. Although it looks complicated, it is actually very simple to operate. Using this method, you can find countless blue ocean link questions.

Although this method will not increase your income immediately, the subsequent income is relatively stable, and the income will increase in the later stages.
The second search method is very similar to the e-commerce operation group title method: use the Taobao drop-down box to select products.

When it comes to promoting products on Zhihu, many people don’t realize one thing: promotion is not about what you say in a grandiose way, but about what I use and you happen to have. Even if some question links have few likes, their conversion rate is very high and the sales volume is also good, because he may be the only one operating this thing, dominating all the traffic on Zhihu and other such websites.

In theory, all products on e-commerce platforms can be recommended.

Headphones, toothbrushes, sneakers, water cups, birthday gifts, selfie sticks, curtains, refrigerators, air conditioners, TV series...

But in reality, you will find that many popular fields are already being operated by others, there are too many competitors, and it is not easy to rank the answers. At this time, we need to use the Taobao drop-down box to assist in a wave of screening, for example, when we search for headphones.

The competition for headphones is fierce on Zhihu, so we make Bluetooth headphones, headphone cases, headphone covers, headphone protective covers, over-ear headphones, and in-ear headphones.

Following this idea, we can excel in vertical fields. Another idea is that some brands of products have their own traffic, so we can reply to keyword questions about this brand + product and get exposure. The above are two common methods for finding problems. Due to limited space, I will not go into details.

Kind tips:

At present, Zhihu Good Things is still in the blue ocean field, and there are good and bad people doing training in the market. Everyone should be more vigilant in this area. If you really want to find someone to pay for learning, it is best to have face-to-face teaching, so that you will be less likely to be cheated.

According to Xiucai's own point of view, it is not difficult to make a living by selling products on Zhihu. You can do more and observe more of your peers, and communicate more with Xiucai. At least it can help you avoid many detours. As long as you are willing to spend time on research, you will most likely be able to succeed.

Finally, I’d like to share with you an advanced way to use Zhihu: answer traffic-generating articles to get high rankings on the site.

Let me first talk about the idea of ​​this game: This is an on-site SEO strategy. Every day, people search for different keywords on Zhihu, and the articles ranked at the top will absorb this part of the traffic. Therefore, if our articles can have a high weight on the site, we can get greater exposure.

Specific operation methods:

When writing an article on Zhihu, please note that I am talking about articles here.

This article is an article recommending good things, that is, an article interspersed with promotional links. This article is published first, and then the link to this article plus a small amount of text is published as answers to different questions. The answers are used to attract traffic to the article and raise the article's ranking on the site.

I would like to emphasize that when this answer + text is posted under other questions, the text cannot be exactly the same. More specifically, there cannot be 32 words that are exactly the same, otherwise it will be easily judged by Zhihu as "posting the same content."

After learning the previous methods, you will become a mature Zhihu salesperson. All that remains is to keep working in the same field (continuously answering under the same topic will gain the weight assigned by the topic), and later combine tools such as Zhi+ and Business Advisor to assist in product selection and exposure, and you can become a stable and powerful player on Zhihu Good Products.

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